On Broadway: Why Nice Work If You Can Get It deserved all its Tony nominations today, and why Leap of Faith and Ghost the Musical were mostly overlooked

Nice work if you can get it: A Tony nod, that is.
Lots of shows and performers got a nod today when Broadway announced its annual Tony
nominations for the best work of the 2012-13 season.
Nice Work If You Can Get It, with 10 nominations, is one of four shows competing for a
Tony for best musical.
Only one musical received more nods:
Once, a modest but charming musical adapted from the independent film about two struggling
Irish musicians who begin to fall in love.
With 11 nominations, this deceptively simple but profoundly wise musical now must be
considered the front-runner for the all-important 2012 Tony award for best musical.
But
Nice Work, a Broadway crowdpleaser that appeals to a far more traditional audience, could
give
Once some competition.
Last week, when I visited New York to cover Broadway for
The Dispatch, I blogged about the many virtues of
Once and
The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, with 10 nominations the leading contender for best musical
revival.
Now that I’m back in Columbus, let me explain why
Nice Work If You Can Get It deserved its many nominations but
Ghost the Musical and
Leap of Faith were largely overlooked.
Basically, it’s because
Nice Work mostly works – and the others mostly don’t.

Kelli O'Hara and Matthew Broderick in the Broadway musical
Nice Work If You Can Get It. Credit: Joan Marcus

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET ITNice Work delivers quite a lot of what people want in an old-fashioned valentine to the
screwball musical comedy fare of the 1920s and 1930s.
Just not as much as many of us want, after having thoroughly enjoyed the similar pleasures of
two other “new” Gershwin musicals in previous decades: Tommy Tune’s delightful
My One and Only in the 1980s and the giddy champagne bubbles of
Crazy for You in the 1990s.
In comparison,
Nice Work falters here and there, but it’s still lots of funand loads of laughs –
and more important for its box office, fills a gap that Broadway audiences have yearned to be
filled.
From its wonderful Gershwin tunes to the jazz-age dancing orchestrated winningly by
choreographer-director Kathleen Marshall (in the spirit she successfully invoked for
Anything Goes, last season’s hit revival),
Nice Work generates tuneful momentum.
The book by Joe DiPietro (a Tony winner for writing the book to
Memphis), inspired partly by the 1926 Gershwin musical
Oh, Kay!, sometimes strains to wed old songs to a new story of unlikely romantic pair-ups,
but still delivers some priceless moments of pure slapstick.
Kelli O’Hara (South Pacific) outshines Matthew Broderick (The Producers) as the lead romantic couple but they lead a terrific cast, with hilarious
support from Michael McGrath as a bootletter pretending to be a butler and Broadway veteran Judy
Kaye, who literally swings on a chandelier as a Prohibitionist battleaxe who finally gets
deliriously drunk.
You may not get drunk with laughter at
Nice Work, but you'll definitely get tipsy.

Raul Esparza as Jonas Nightingale in
Leap of Faith

LEAP OF FAITHThe last new musical to open on Broadway this past season is also one of its least.
It takes a leap of faith to create a new musical. But for
Leap of Faith, the Alan Menken adaptation of the 1992 Steve Martin film, the leap didn’t
quite make it across the gulf of the audience's intended suspension of disbelief - or the critics’
mostly negative reviews last week.
Leap of Faith, about a contemporary con-man/preacher who tours Middle America by bus with
his gospel-rousing crew, is a complicated misfire.
Part of the problem may be the miscasting of Raul Esparza, a terrific Broadway talent
(Company) who’s been nominated for four other performances in recent years but who usually
plays a cynical observer.
As preacher Jonas Nightingale, Esparza seems way too cynical and unbelievable right off the
bat to convince and hoodwink anyone on his bus tour – least of all a modern Broadway audience.
Part of the problem may be the interactive show-within-a-show staging, set both in
Sweetwater, Kansas, and in the present at New York’s St. James Theatre, where the cast in a
pre-show sequence wander down the aisles to whoop up the crowd and hand out fake money for us to “
donate” later during the gospel revival act. Huh?
But much of the problem, I suspect, comes from an uneven tone, cliched characters and
ambiguities that stem from the much-revised direction and book of a show that never really makes up
its mind about what its focus and theme should be.
Alan Menken’s gospel-tinged and country-laced songs seem generic at first hearing, Only
Long Past Dreamin’ (sung poignantly by Jessica Phillips, mom of a crippled boy, and
Sweetwater’s protective and suspicious sheriff) left enough of an impression for me to want to hear
it again.
Too bad, because
Leap of Faith might have been more.
Certainly, there’s room in musical theater for a show about how small-town Americans live and
the faith they need to survive amid tough times.
With only one nomination, though, even one for best musical, this Los Angeles-gestated
musical probably won’t last long in New York.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph as fake psychic Oda Mae Brown, left, with Richard Fleeshman as the
spirit of murdered Sam Wheat, center, and Bryce Pinkham as Carl Bruner in a scene from
Ghost the Musical.

GHOST THE MUSICALGhost, meanwhile, is an odd case because it “works” onstage just fine, but never really
justifies itself as a musical.
A musical of a popular film should offer something fresh, whether tuneful new songs or deeper
characters and plot twists. But
Ghost simply recycles the familiar film without much embellishment, other than a
strikingly 21st century staging that makes the most of multimedia projections at the cost of
drowning out the live performers onstage.
Quite understandably,
Ghost was nominated for two Tonys – for its dazzling MTV-style scenic design and ghostly
lighting.
But significantly, the only other nomination the London import received – and the only one
for those still-important live human beings performing onstage – was for Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s
spirited recycling of sassy Oda Mae Brown, the fake psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg in the film.
Here's a musical that needed more humanity and less technology to touch audiences - and the
Tony voters.